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At some point everyone has come across a story that moves them to take action. Whether it’s NPR’s “This I Believe” series or reality TV shows like The Biggest Loser, we relate to and are motivated by the experience of others.

This is especially true when it comes to weight loss and fitness.

At dotFIT, we live and breathe fitness and weight loss. If you could be a fly on the wall in our office, you would hear it all day long – we talk about new studies that support or refute our position, how to get our program in front of beginners who need help losing weight but are intimidated by the gym environment, how to explain the necessity of a multivitamin during weight loss . . . it goes on and on. Of course we want our products and program to be the best. But what spurs us on are the stories of regular people who’ve struggled with weight their whole lives, and suddenly they “get it.” A light goes on and weight control makes sense. That’s when we know we’re doing something right.

We want to hear your story. And we want to share it with others on dotFIT.com when we roll out our updated site design in a few weeks. What drives you to be fit? What’s your goal? How is dotFIT helping you along the way? Just send an email to marketing@dotFIT.com if you’d like to share.

Through many years and literally thousands of clients, I’ve periodically encountered a client who I just could not figure out how to motivate. Every little victory was quickly undermined by obviously poor choices. One day, I asked such a client, “Can you truly picture yourself achieving your weight loss goal?”

Her answer was no. Hmmm.

What is the likelihood of someone achieving something challenging if they are secretly certain they will never achieve it? Nada. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Goose egg.

So, I began employing visualization into my personal training presentations and follow ups to uncover a potential problem out of the gate. It made a tremendous difference in compliance and success.
Without further ado, here are some tips that changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope you find them as helpful as I did.

Write down your goal(s) and why (if you ink it, you think it). This will make it real.

Write down several affirmations related to your goals, using language that describes it happening or already done. Read this first thing upon waking up and again just before sleep, this way you begin and end the day in a positive mind set to take action on your goals. Examples:

I am healthy and full of energy

I am losing unhealthy fat

I make good food choices

I am making great progress

I can see/feel my body changing

I enjoy the physical activity I can do with my family

I love how my endurance has increased, etc

If you catch yourself having negative internal (or external) dialogue immediately stop and change the thoughts or words to something positive. Doing this consciously leads to unconscious positive dialogue and thoughts.

If you have 10 minutes in a day to practice a bit of visualization, it can be tremendously valuable

Sit comfortably and picture yourself in a relaxing place. I like to imagine sitting under a Palapa on the beach in the Caribbean. Work on visualizing all of the details of your surroundings: air temp, slight breeze, sounds. Then, turn this attention to detail to yourself. Picture what you want to look and feel like while you are in this environment. See your healthier, trimmer you. Put as much detail into this picture as you can. This will allow you to program the success or “after” picture in your mind.

Heard the saying, “the body cannot go where the mind has not been”? This is setting up the end point in your mind and it is simply a matter of time until the body catches up. The practice of visualization works and it has been used by THE most successful people in any field throughout history.

You are already thinking of things, you might as well spend a little time and make sure that those thoughts are positive and moving you forward, not holding you back. I know you will do well.